Outdoors: Government aids Connecticut River Watershed

Great news for local sportsmen: President Obama’s administration has made a major contribution to our region’s outdoors, reminiscent of President Kennedy’s creation of our National Seashore.

The Connecticut River Watershed has been designated as the first National Blueway in America. This achievement is part of the president’s America’s Great Outdoors Rivers Initiative to establish a community-driven conservation and recreation agenda for the 21st century. More than 40 organizations under the umbrella of the Friends of the Silvio Conte Refuge worked to conserve and restore the river for wildlife, people and outdoor recreation, and provide a model for future National Blueways.

Gov. Patrick’s administration, taking full advantage of funding from many sources, also has succeeded in adding significant parcels of land — more than 100,000 acres since 2007 — to the state’s outdoors. The acquisition of a conservation restriction with public access on the 3,486 acres in Leverett and Shutesbury was the single largest conservation restriction on a contiguous block of privately owned land in Massachusetts history.

The Department of Fish and Game and the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife have protected 31,751 acres since the beginning of the Patrick administration. This month, the department and the division closed on the latest in a series of purchases totaling approximately 500 acres from A.D. Makepeace, one of the world’s largest cranberry companies. That’s great news for sportsmen, naturalists, and future generations who will face a world depleted of wild opportunities and natural treasures. Patrick continues to impress with his support of open space acquisition and protection.

Across the country, we’re losing wetlands. Over the last 12 years, our state’s Fish and Game Division of Ecological Restoration, though, has overseen more than 62 wetland restoration projects that protect wildlife habitat and sustain commercial and recreational fisheries. Healthy marshes are nurseries for game fish like winter flounder, striped bass and essential baitfish like sticklebacks and mummichogs.

Forty wetland projects under development soon could add 2,000 acres of restored wetlands. Bill Hubbard of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Coastal America Partnership says, “Massachusetts is a regional and national leader in wetland acres restored and sheer number of projects implemented.”

Federal stimulus dollars have funded most of the work and deserve much credit. But municipal, nonprofit and private-sector funding has also been substantial.

The recent Brewster restoration on Stony Brook Salt Marsh has restored natural tidal flow to a degraded salt marsh and enhanced fish access to 386 acres of ponds that provide essential habitat for dwindling river herring and American eels. Though we still lose too much open space every year, we can at least cling to portions that we know aren’t going to be exploited.

In a time when business interests with enough political clout threaten to privatize and develop more of our wild land, every effort to save large tracts of unique, unfragmented treasures for future generations becomes more vital.

As a hunter and fisherman, I want and need access to areas that are essential for the practice of my tradition. But as a responsible environmentalist regularly venturing into the wildest parts of our planet in Africa and South America, I know there are some special places that should never have the stake of a road driven into their hearts — or the drills, saws and bulldozers of private interest exploiting them.

While some land and its wildlife clearly benefit from clear cutting, establishing vital new growth, reducing the likelihood of forest fires and increasing wildlife populations, other land needs to be left alone.

Some politicians would divide us and in many cases they’ve succeeded, brainwashing sportsmen into thinking there’s a black-and-white war between preservationists and conservationists. No enlightened naturalist should ever think that all land should be preserved. No enlightened sportsmen should ever believe that all land should be conserved. Enlightened sportsmen/naturalists should be both conservationists and preservationists, depending on the circumstance and the specific nature of the land and its wildlife. No shoe fits all feet.

To say that every piece of land should be exploited for its natural resources and broken up by a grid of access roads shows a lack of understanding and appreciation for the diversity of our open-space heritage and the value of untouched wilderness.

Huge tracts of undeveloped lands, whether we’re in the Serengeti or Alaska, are in some instances like precious, rare, huge diamonds — their value is never retained by breaking them up into smaller parts. Those who don’t know what true wilderness is too often can’t appreciate the unique dynamics that intrusion destroys.

For the past 25 years, I’ve been doing twice-yearly studies in the Amazon rainforest, which has diminished by 50 percent since the end of World War II. Whenever a new road enters it, always for business interests, what inevitably follows is the end of the magic that once drew us to the rainforest. Habitat is always degraded and wildlife is always lost.

We have a limited number of special public lands in America that still belong to all Americans — large tracts that haven’t yet been dissected, where our spirits can soar unbounded. Beware the politicians that, motivated by business interests, will try to seduce us in the name of a weak economy to reduce those lands to fragmented, cultivated entities that will forever lose the magic and allure of wilderness.

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